Spiffy:

Iffy:

Preview version suffers from severe frame-rate issues.

It's funny, you can't really put games like the Ratchet & Clank series up on a pedestal without also acknowledging the genius behind the extraordinarily simple (but effective) formula. This "crazy weapons, loads of killing combined with a destructible environment" formula works, but the Destroy All Humans! series has never truly received the recognition that it deserves for doing a decent job of maintaining the standards we've all come to expect from such games. After getting first-hand experience with the new 360 iteration of the series, Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon looks as though it could deliver this classic formula in a gorgeous package... something the franchise has needed since its inception.

Gotta Kill 'em All

There's some kind of story associated with Path of the Furon, a meandering ramble that involves the series' anti-hero protagonist Crypto becoming bored of harvesting human DNA, opening a casino, getting rolled by the mob for owning the most popular casino, alien robots from Crypto's own planet coming after him as well, and Crypto fleeing to space and discovering some ancient Furon seer of some kind that lets him in on the secret to happiness: harvesting human DNA. Could you follow all that? It's okay if you couldn't, because the simplistic gameplay exhibited in past Destroy All Humans! games doesn't really lend itself to intricate story arcs. What it does lend itself to is abject violence committed alongside some of the most adolescent humor available.

Luckily the story is really not that important. The major draw is the huge arsenal of weapons and their hilarious/decimating abilities.

Guns, Guns, Guns

A few of the weapons from previous Destroy All Humans! games will make appearances in Path of the Furon, but the new weapons and Crypto's revised skill-set are definitely the most interesting aspects. While the Dislocator (which enables you to move objects around) maintains its position in Crypto's arsenal, it can now be used in conjunction with Crypto's other abilities. In previous games, Crypto had to choose between using his jet pack, tossing stuff around with his innate Psychokinesis ability (moving things with his mind) and firing weapons, but in Path of the Furon he can combine any or all of these abilities for both comedic effect and also to demonstrate some exceptional examples of emergent chaos.

Add to this mix a new power called the Temporal Fist which freezes time for a few seconds while still allowing Crypto to interact and otherwise manipulate the world around him, and you've got all the ingredients for some pretty ridiculous physics trickery. As an example, Crypto engaged the Temporal Fist and subsequently began lifting some busses into the air while positioning a crowd of hapless humans directly beneath them... you can guess what happened when the Temporal Fist wore off. Best of all, when using Temporal Fist in conjunction with Psychokinesis, you can give your targets some velocity to make sure that they will rocket in any direction when the Temporal Fist runs out of juice. Anything that you do this to will be imbued with a certain amount of kinetic charge (similar to the X-Men's Gambit and his kinetic cards), so anything you apply a vector to using Temporal Fist and Psychokinesis becomes a sort of explosive grenade. Including random bystanders.

Crypto's trusty flying saucer also has quite a wide variety of particle-accelerating methods of mass destruction, but the feature that has the most impact is the ability for it to engage enemies vertically as well as horizontally. In previous games, the saucer used a kind of fixed bird's eye view, but Path of the Furon frees the saucer from its planar prison so that you can look (and fire) all around you. To make things extra-fun, all the damage from your weapons remains on-screen persistently, rendering the ability to write your name across a series of skyscrapers not only possible, but also a hilarious diversion to the game's fairly standard mission-based progression.

What really make this collection of bizarre weapons satisfying are the copious special effects. It's pretty clear that Path of the Furon shines especially bright when seen in detailed HD, so the move to next-gen consoles seems to be a major improvement for the series.

Scheduled to ship this fall, Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon may be the first game in the series since the original to really capture our attention with its staggering array of offensive weaponry and the utterly silly situations that come about from combining Crypto's abilities.